LogFAQs > #966139125

John Boyega may have been the biggest waste of a talented young actor in all three movies. He displayed some pretty impressive acting chops in TFA... then, come TLJ, he was turned into the plucky comic relief character (and I say that as someone who generally *liked* TLJ) and that was still somehow an improvement over his treatment in TRoS. Honestly, I feel like Abrams wasn't paying attention at the end of TLJ and just assumed Finn died... then only found out right before filming in TRoS that he didn't and had to just go, "Uh... uh... y'know what, just follow the other heroes around and make the occasional snappy one-liner! That'll work!"

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Except he absolutely wasn't. If anything, he might have been better if he was.

Mace was passionless cardboard cutout Jedi. It doesn't matter how much the EU or supplemental stuff tells you that he's secretly brimming over with rage and channels that into his fighting style, almost nothing Samuel L Jackson does acting-wise conveys that. It's part of what makes Mace lame - he's dull.

Lucas deciding that the old Jedi Council was basically just a bunch of serene monks with little to no personality was a mistake. There were better ways to portray both the order and its members in the prequels that would have worked way better.

Agreed, mostly. The Jedi in the prequels were such a fucking waste.

Really, though, Samuel L. Jackson struck me as a big miscast for a Jedi. You could have cast him in any number of interesting roles that actually played to his strengths - bounty hunter, Republic general, crime boss - but Jedi just seemed like a bad matchup for him. He put as much Samuel L. Jackson magic into Mace as the character allowed (which is to say almost none), but it just felt tremendously forced and boring.